I deeply love my rescue beagle Sophie and trust that she will continue to love me unconditionally even as I insult her publicly by observing that contemporary Arkansas Republican legislators remind me of her.
She's high-strung and over-reacting. She takes it intently on herself to patrol the perimeter of this property, though no one asked her.
She sometimes explodes in ear-piercing baying and wild gyration. It happens whenever someone comes up the back alley just beyond her fence line, no matter how uneventfully, and manages somehow to concern, titillate, offend or frighten her.
It could be joggers from the high school, the neighborhood dog-walker and his leashed pack, or the trash recyclers. To her, they're all sources of agitation for being different.
Sometimes her tail wags wildly as she screeches from the mouth and hackles rise on her back. She is, in that sense, tri-polar.
Often her carryings-on cause other neighborhood dogs to bark, though they don't know why.
I'm wondering if some of these legislators weren't rescued from abusive puppy mills as Sophie was, thus sustaining baggage from early childhood.
Today's Arkansas Republican legislators patrol the perimeter of the state. No one asked them. They look to the alley just past the border and suspect that the front-running jogger from the high school is a boy running with girls, or is dressed in drag or is a birth-certificate male scheming to go the school bathroom with their daughters.
They screech from the mouth, because they're afraid. The wag their tails, because they're titillated by the prospect of winning applause from the crowded conservative grandstand. They form hackles along their backs, because difference from their norm just makes them so danged mad.
The main differences from Sophie are that Sophie is otherwise adorable and not yet authorized to instruct the Bureau of Legislative Research to draft bills for her.
Sen. Gary Stubblefield barked in a bill that sought to place restrictions on an ill-defined facility where persons identified as "drag queens" because of cross-gender costuming engage in entertainment performances and sub-culture association and revelry. He got the bill passed by a vote of 29-6 because all the other 28 Republicans started barking because he did.
The bill went to the House where, apparently, Attorney General Tim Griffin or his people injected themselves to say the bill was so vaguely targeted at a venue rather than personal behavior that it was highly suspect in court. Griffin is himself a yapping pup who fancies himself a lead dog and didn't want for his own political sake to recommend against the bill if called to testify. So, he took the bill back to his office and had it rewritten to cover activity, not venues.
What he produced was a ban on indecent sexual behavior--which is somewhat in the eye of the beholder--including the acts (by anyone, not a gender-bender alone) of getting into a "semi-nude" state or calling special attention to personal parts whether actual or prosthetic, and doing so in the presence of minor children in a way that taps public funds.
There is no known problem--or at least generally reported one--of children being forced to watch a semi-nude person (presumably of some covered and some uncovered body parts, such as when attired in short-sleeve shirt) while that person inhabits a public facility and calls special attention to genitalia, be it native or imported.
We have a law against indecent exposure, which is all the bill is talking about even as it professes to be about much more.
Sometimes Sophie will let out an I'm-still-here bark long after the agitation in the alley has gone, just to remind that she has something to say, by golly, about that thing before that she didn't like, whatever it was, and the nature of which she couldn't describe if she tried.
This GOP pack is determined to bark with or without something to bark about.
I think I'll start calling my gal Republican rather than Sophie. She'd fit right in at the Capitol except that she's not at all gender-conscious in her bathroom practices.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.